


Paralela

by Anonymous



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 15:50:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10441281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The sun elves believe twins are lucky, but Taako is not a twin.





	

The sun elves believe twins are lucky, but Taako is not a twin.

He was alone when he stroked his mother's ears in her last days, while she coughed ink into the blanket. His aunt had pulled him from the room when she'd caught him, and it had been a miracle he didn't get sick. The only miracle, as it happened.

He'd been alone on the road, evading men and dogs and finding shelter under the awnings of a barn. He knows because it had been so quiet, besides the rain. He couldn't speak or even cry, and wouldn't for weeks later.

He knows his only friend in the caravan had been a girl as naive and bitter as him, with as sordid and ugly a past that went just as unspoken. With her he'd traded bad advice about humans, and growing up, and men, for braided hair and painted nails. She was the closest he would ever have to a sister, a relationship as complex-- and sometimes ugly-- as the lives they'd been thrust into.

He was alone for years after, because everyone was hungry and everybody would take the gold from your pocket in the morning if you did not wake up before them. There were jobs and friends, orbiting at a distance he needed.

There were delicious, hard-won moments of true security and solitude in the tiny bed of his wagon. _His_ wagon. There was Sazed, and then there was not Sazed. There was a familiar baseline to return to, in the absence of everything.

He knows that anything is good to keep, as long as it's yours. And people can never be _yours,_ so he doesn't want them. And lonely as loneliness be, it's the only thing he can feel securely entitled to.

One. Indivisible. There's a peace in that.

 

\---

 

Her face is washed in green light, and she's crying. He searches a hollow feeling in his chest. There's only icy horror, seeping in on every side.

"I've got to do this," she explains, wiping away her eyes. She looks at the tank, (not at him,) like it's the only thing in the world. "I can't remember it-- this. Thing, in my head. I can feel it."

She raises her hands, cupping them around her long ears, digging her nails-- unpainted-- into her hair. "I didn't mean to see it. It's crawling all over, it's in everything." He expect, wants, to be moved to sympathy through shock, but he can't relate. Whatever it is that's haunting her it's haunting her alone, and something about that seems truly wrong. But that's about all it seems. He stands with his posture stiff, watching a stranger, knowing she's supposed to be more, not knowing if he could bear it if she was. After what happened to her.

She lowers her hands over her mouth, then whispers through them. "I can't be what it'll make me."

It clicks, then. And with it, a distant echo of familiarity, a pang of understanding. There's sudden fear enough that he wants to speak, but nothing comes out.

He can't be two people. He can't be alone, and not alone, and yes, and no, and both, and neither. Those wires spark when they cross, and he's been burned too many times. So there's not anything he can stand to do but recoil, to retreat back onto the crumbling center of what he knows. He doesn't know which version of himself to kill; familiar, hard-won resilience or a hypothetical, happier stranger, and he could even be jealous of her clarity.

She looks at him, finally. Sort of tired, and more desperate than hopeful. "She told me I'll be fine. Do you know how that feels? A Goddess of fate said I'll be _happy_. Really happy." And the relief in her eyes becomes relief in his chest, because he doesn't know her at all, ( _snips of memories, the familiarity in her gaze,_ ) but he'd still give everything for it. "We never got to know something like that."

 _We_. His own tank is there to the right, in an identical green pod; twins within twins, a thought that makes a hysterical bubble of laughter erupt out of his chest. He touches his hands to his lips to quiet it.

"She said you'll be happy, too."

"God, _fuck_ what makes me happy," He says, not in half because he could barely identify what it would be, even if given the time they don't have. She laughs, momentarily free from whatever is paining her-- something too cosmic in scope for him to even guess, something he's been mercifully spared from. "This is-- it's your chance. Take it! It's what I'd do."

She still looks afraid. He feels afraid. "You'll be okay, on your own?" She asks. Asking implicitly, _will I?_

"Bubale, I've been alone my whole life," He quips. It sounds different than he'd meant, in a voice he's never used before. She smiles anyway.

He figures it'll all be gone in a moment, so he does one right thing in his life. He hugs her, for the first and only time.

 

\----

 

He's lying down in a sunny hillside in western Faerun, his head along Magnus' bicep and flowers in his braid. Magnus pokes in another small daisy into the locks, plucking a circle of the grass they lay in bare of its wildflowers.

Behind them, the cabin sits unfinished, and off in the distance to their right a pair of women Magnus knew from years ago talk and laugh, tired from the morning of work they'd all put in. (Well, he'd mostly catered the whole arrangement. Building a house was harder stuff than he was made of, he told them, and Magnus only smiled, knowing it a lie. Not minding, as he does.)

His new wagon sits parked at the right, as of yet empty of provisions for a new show-- but only for now. The best season of the year was coming, and he had plans. Big plans. He'd earned them.

"Pretty cool how we saved the world, huh?" He mutters. It's as surreal as it is joyous.

"Yeah," Magnus says, too content to say any more. As many words as he usually has to offer, he feels the ease of the day pulling them out of his head before they reach his mouth. Taako imagines the flowers like tiny voidfish, their petals as the long tendrils, their stems like some long mouth sucking up memories from bugs and worms. He doesn't even care. He's _blissfully_ happy.

 _Trust me, IT'S CHILL_ , he'd written down for himself. In different handwriting, below that, was a simple order; _We did good. Go be yourself. Go decide who that is._ Somewhere in the world, the note has a similar twin, though he doesn't know it. Somewhere out there it's held close by a woman who doesn't know his name, but is nonetheless content.

More giggling rises from their right, and Taako rolls his eyes fondly. "Listen to those two lovebirds."

"Mhmm," Magnus agrees. Above them, clouds as big and white as anything drift in the bigger sky, and the world feels infinite, (immovable,) and bigger than anything that might try to swallow it whole. Again he fails to have anything to say; he watches the clouds, and Magnus watches him, and there's nothing he lost-- nothing he'd been lost from-- nothing he hadn't let go of-- nothing that hadn't let go of him. Two in a pair. There's peace in that, too.

 

\--

 

Years later, the sun elves are rebuilding. He's had a chance for many reunions, after everything has settled down. With very few exceptions they're all people he's never met, but they're the same enough when they say _the forest_ in a tone of shared loss.

Plenty of the cities had fared better in the exodus-- most, even. But more people had survived that plague than he'd known, and among them is a woman he immediately gets along with.

"How old is she?" He asks, pointing to the baby on her hip. She grins a mile wide when she answers; "A year and a half."

He grins back, "No kidding. Mine too!" And then, why the hell not? He knows a half-elf when he sees one, and could use the camaraderie. "She's in the hall with her dad. I should introduce you."

He'd never admit it to Magnus, but some sun elves _do_ look alike. It's at least enough to explain their faces. His mother's family was large, prestigious, enough for him to have cousins or second cousins, or anything tucked away into secret corners of the world. But Elly can't hunt down a single lead. Lup swears she can't remember anything from back then; "I was a bit too young to handle it." But there's not a shadow of loss on her face. Not on his, either. Not for the rest of their lives or ever after.

Twins or not, they are lucky enough to find happiness wherever they go.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I can't handle more traumatized characters with new baggage to untangle so I gave them what I would want, even if it maybe didn't come out so clear or relatable.


End file.
